1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing device, an image forming apparatus, and a process control system including the information processing device and the image forming apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, use of network-based multifunction products (MFPs) is becoming increasingly popular. Such MFPs are playing an important role in streamlining the business work, and particularly in data-delivery management systems that convert paper documents into electronic data and distribute it over a network. The important components of a conventional data-delivery management system are image readers such as scanners and data-delivery management servers. A data-delivery management server is registered with a plurality of delivery processes. A user can select a desired delivery process from an operation panel of the data-delivery management server and instruct the scanner to start scanning a document. After the scanned document is delivered to a destination in electronic form, the user can alter collation information regarding the scanned document.
Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2003-032425 discloses a delivery system for scanned image data in which image data of a scanned document is sent to a remote server for data management and billing management (refer to FIG. 21A). A scanner scans a document and retrieves image data of the document. The image data is transferred through a network to a remote server where it is stored and managed. When there is a request for the image data, the remote server sends it to the source of request (e.g., a personal computer) through the network.
Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2004-171199 discloses a document management system with an automatic delivery function in which information about a destination folder is provided at a predetermined area of image data of a scanned document (refer to FIG. 21B). While scanning a document, a user can select a temporary folder to temporarily store the image data of the scanned document. When the scanning is complete, a delivery processing unit attaches information about the destination folder to the image data and then the image data is stored in the temporary folder. An optical character recognition (OCR) unit recognizes the information about the destination folder as a text data. Based on the text data, the image data is retransferred to the destination folder. Thus, the user's task of storing a scanned document in the destination folder is simplified. The automatic delivery function can also be implemented when the scanner sequentially scans a plurality of documents.
Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2005-208934 discloses a document-delivery processing system that automatically performs necessary image processing on a scanned document and delivers the image data to a predetermined destination (refer to FIG. 21C). In the document-delivery processing system, an OCR form sheet is provided on the first page of a document to be scanned. When the document is scanned, an OCR form recognizing unit recognizes from the OCR form sheet the code-data corresponding to the image processing menus defined in the OCR form sheet and the area-data corresponding to an area on the image data on which image processing is to be performed. A document-data extracting unit extracts the code-data and the area-data recognized by the OCR form recognizing unit. An image processing unit performs image processing corresponding to the code-data within the area indicated in the area-data. A document-data delivery unit then delivers the processed image data to a predetermined destination.
However, in case of using a conventional data-delivery management system, the user cannot edit collation information such as file name of an image-data file unless the image-data file is delivered to the desired destination. That is, only after the image-data file is delivered to the desired destination, the user can open the image-data file to edit the collation information. To repeat such a procedure for every image-data file is a cumbersome task. Moreover, when an image-data file is delivered to a plurality of destinations, the user has to edit the collation information of the image-data file at each destination. Furthermore, when an image-data file is sent from another user, it is difficult for the receiver to understand the contents of the image-data file just by referring to, e.g., the unedited file name at the time of delivery.